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| Analysis of the Influence Path of Voluntary Information Disclosure on Enterprise Technological Innovation |
| Gao Minghua,Liu Bobo |
| (School of Business and Administration, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China) |
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Abstract Information disclosure is an important institutional arrangement to protect investors' rights and interests by solving information asymmetry. Information disclosure is not only to reduce the investment risk of investors, but also to help investors focus on and support the technological innovation of enterprises. Technological innovation is an important factor for the sustainable development of enterprises. Compared with other investments, innovation projects are characterized by high investment risk, high degree of uncertainty and long lag period of returns, which makes enterprises vulnerable to external financing constraints and internal agency problems in innovation activities. Information asymmetry is the root cause of the above problems. Therefore, how to alleviate information asymmetry, reduce financing constraints and agency conflicts is very important to effectively improve the level of enterprise technological innovation. Based on the theory of information economics, enterprises can improve their transparency by disclosing more information about their current business strength and future development potential to investors. The existing research on the relationship between information disclosure and enterprise technological innovation is still in its infancy, there is little relevant literature, and most of them regard information disclosure as a whole, or analyze the impact of mandatory information disclosure on innovation separately, while few scholars pay attention to the research on the relationship between voluntary information disclosure and technological innovation. In practice, mandatory information disclosure can hardly meet the rational investment needs of investors, while voluntary information disclosure can make up for this defect. This paper focuses on the impact of voluntary information disclosure on the technological innovation of listed companies in China, and discusses its mechanism from two perspectives of financing and governance, so as to make up for the shortcomings of existing research.#br#This paper takes China's A-share listed companies from 2013 to 2020 as the research sample, uses the voluntary information disclosure index developed by the authors to empirically test the impact and mechanism of voluntary information disclosure on enterprise technological innovation, and explores the moderating effect of internal and external corporate governance factors on this relationship. The results show that voluntary information disclosure significantly improves the technological innovation level of enterprises. The external governance environment and internal governance mechanism will affect the positive relationship between voluntary information disclosure and enterprise technological innovation. Specifically, the marketization process, the nature of non-state-owned property rights and the executive stock incentive will strengthen the promotion effect of voluntary information disclosure on enterprise technological innovation. The moderating effects of controlling shareholder’s shareholding, board structure, board behavior and executive compensation incentive are not obvious. The empirical results of the influencing mechanism show that voluntary information disclosure can alleviate the inhibition effect of the first type of agency problem and external financing constraints on enterprise technological innovation, and thus promote enterprise technological innovation. This study provides empirical evidence of the causal relationship between voluntary information disclosure and enterprise technological innovation, which has strong enlightenment significance on how to promote the sustainable development of enterprises and build an innovative country in the new era.#br#Therefore, we can get the following policy enlightenment. First, regulators should encourage listed companies to make more voluntary information disclosure, and at the same time strengthen market supervision of voluntary information disclosure in order to promote listed companies to improve the quality of voluntary information disclosure. Second, enterprises themselves should attach importance to the value of voluntary information disclosure in improving the level of technological innovation, and take the initiative to timely and accurately disclose more information that may have a material impact on investors’ investment decisions. Third, the shareholding ratio of controlling shareholders should be moderately reduced, the proportion of independent directors should be increased and the intervention of major shareholders should be significantly reduced to enhance the independence of the board of directors and enable the board of directors to make scientific decisions conducive to the long-term development of enterprises and the growth of long-term interests of shareholders, such as technological innovation. Fourth, the separation of chairman and general manager has been widely accepted, the independence of general manager’s daily operation decisions should be strengthened. As long as his decisions do not deviate from the strategic decisions of the board of directors, the chairman should not interfere so as to maximize the creative potential of general manager. Fifth, equity incentives for senior executives should be enhanced, especially stock options, so that their decisions should be based on the long-term development of the company and subject to the supervision of shareholders. Lastly the government should establish and improve laws and regulations, reduce government intervention in enterprises, allocate resources through the market, improve the level of regional financial development and create a good external governance environment for enterprises and improve the quality of voluntary information disclosure.#br#
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Received: 07 September 2021
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